Doing your own Linguistics Job Interviews
After eight years and over 80 interviews, the monthly Superlinguo Linguistics Job Interviews series will wrap up at the end of 2022. You can see the full list linking to the interviews here. I have learnt so much from the stories of people who have gone on to a wide range of jobs and careers, and who make use of their linguistic knowledge in their jobs. Thanks to Martha Tsutsui Billins, who has been running the interviews in 2022, I’ve enjoyed reading them as an audience member!
While it is the end of regular scheduled interviews, this is far from the last I will have to say about linguistics and its use in different workplaces and careers. There will be some updates in 2023, which I’m looking forward to sharing with you. I also want to encourage you to do your own interviews!
Why interview people about linguistics and jobs?
There are any number of good reasons to do them. Perhaps:
1. You studied linguistics and now you use those skills, insights and experiences in your current job, career, or life. Maybe it was a whole PhD? Or perhaps just one specific course/subject that shaped your understanding of language? You can follow the Linguistics Job Interviews process and share your experiences with your social media networks! I did this for the Superlinguo series and enjoyed the opportunity to reflect.
2. You are a student or worker who is thinking about jobs and careers and you want to talk to people to learn about different jobs and careers. You can do this for your own information, as an informal coffee chat, or maybe you want to publish and share what you’ve learnt for other students where you study, or other people online. This is why I did the Superlinguo series for the first four or five years, as I navigated study and then precarious employment.
3. You work in a linguistics program at a university or college and want to check in with your former students. Perhaps you want to ask them to share their experiences with your current students, or maybe you want to do some planning around the structure and content of your program. I’ve made use of the Superlinguo series for the last few years for both of these reasons.
As you can see, I have run the Superlinguo Linguistics Jobs Interview series for all three of these reasons at different times!
How to do interviews
I started doing interviews using my own networks, and those of my friends and teachers at my university. I have always run them as email interviews, because I was most interested in giving people the time and space to write answers they were happy with. If you are doing interviews for your own career planning you might find that asking someone for coffee or a phone chat that can go on different tangents is more useful.
You can also “cold” contact people. Sometimes people on twitter or linkedin will say they’re happy to be contacted about their careers. When you contact someone, even if they’re happy to be messaged, remember they’re doing you a favour and may not always have time. People often don’t get back to you, it’s nothing personal, people are busy with their own jobs and colleagues. This is why often an existing personal connection is so useful.
Always make sure that you know what you want to do with the interview, and that you make that clear to people when you contact them. If you just want an informal short chat, that’s very different to asking if you can share in the print magazine of your college or posting something to the internet.
These kind of interviews, where you ask someone about their experiences, are known as Informational Interviews. The Linguistics Jobs Resources slide set (bit.ly/ling-jobs) has lots of information and links to other resources about how you can run your own informational interviews, either for yourself, a careers fair at your institution or for sharing online.
What I put into my interviews
As I said above, I always conducted interviews by email. This was mostly because I wasn’t doing informational interviews for my own career planning.
I always ask the same set of questions. I appreciate the very different responses I would get from people in different jobs and different stages of their careers. Below I have bolded the bits I kept in the published interview, and which bits were there are prompts for the person being interviewed:
What is your job title? (used to title the interview and write the intro)
What did you study at university? (What was your degree? What linguistics did you study? What else?)
What is your job? (Fancy title? What do you do day-to-day?)
How does your linguistics training help you in your job? (Or, does it help at all?)
What was the transition from university to work like for you? (both in general terms and in terms of applying your linguistics in a workplace)
Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
Any other thoughts or comments? (Also, is there anything I should be asking that I'm not?)
I added question five about the transition from uni to work only a couple of years ago, when I realised that was a gap in the interviews that provided useful information. You don’t have to use these questions specifically, but I have found they provide a good starting point.
Let me know if you do any public interviews so I can share them too!
If you share your own job experience on public social media, or if you interview people online about their linguistics job experience, please do tag me on twitter or email (superlinguo æ gmail dot com). I plan to keep sharing and aggregating job resources.
Resources
The Linguistics Jobs Resources slide set (bit.ly/ling-jobs)
Superlinguo Linguist Job Interviews full list
